Cathy’s P.O.V
;;A Description of those Living in the Hotel & the General Insanity Within
Families are like fudge - mostly sweet with a few nuts.
~Author Unknown
The Hotel was warm that day in the cold winter night. The woodstoves were burning, heating the whole house, smelling sweetly from the iron kettle full of water and cinnamon oil, steaming its way to nothing on top of the stove. The scent worked its way through the walls and airways of the Hotel and lingered in my bedroom, clinging to the plaster walls. Outside the thick glass of my window, it was snowing, and if you stared long enough outside the window, you began to feel you were floating in the blackness.
Ronni knocked on my door. “Hey, Cathy, want to help me pry Nisha and Keri from each other’s throats?” she asked, wiggling her eyebrows comically. “It’ll be fun. C’mon, I brought the jaws of life.”
Nisha was the fighter in our obtuse little family unit. She was constantly fighting with sensitive Keri over the smallest things. Sometimes they were just shouting matches over who got the last cookie, but often times they escalated into knock-down, drag-out fights over something completely stupid. She just got frustrated. Ronni said it wasn’t her fault, that it was just the way she was wired, but sometimes I wondered if she didn’t get a kick out of it. Nisha was the second to show up at our doorstep.
The first was Jay. She was an old friend of Ronni’s who was just passing through, planning to stop for just a few days to catch up, but ended up staying for a week and then a month. After a while, it was just accepted that she was staying and she got a job in town working at the 7 Eleven and became part of the family. She was like an aunt, fun to play with and serious in only the most serious of moments. Often, she would duck out when problems arose, so when “family meetings” were called, it required a house-wide search. We’d always find her in the oddest of places like the rafters of the attic or in the back of Leanne’s closet, like it was the most natural place in the world to be.
Leanne was strange. Whilst Nisha had heard of the Hotel from Jay, and the other girl, Keri, had heard of it from Nisha, no one was quite sure where Leanne came from. She showed up on the doorstep, completely nonchalant, and asked “Is this the Wilson residence?” and when we replied that yes, it was, she said, “May I stay here?” and we allowed her. We gave her one of the empty rooms on the second floor and a bed and blankets. Nisha, in one of her quieter moments, hung a framed picture on the wall of a Bible verse that read “A friend loveth at all times” which seemed hilariously ironic to us.
We found out that Leanne was lost. She didn’t know one thing about herself for sure. She spent hours cutting photos out of magazines and put it into a notebook. She was so visual. Books never satisfied her enough, and she was always doodling in the margins. It was like she was trying to put together a picture of herself from photographs and quotes from Ray Bradbury. “My mother called me Belles,” she told us one day after years of contemplative silence, “You can, too.” So, we did, anything to help her, in her search for herself.
Keri was the youngest of our guests. Sweet, if not a little hormonal. She wore her heart on her sleeve, where it could be easily bruised. She was usually the one to get into fighting matches with Nisha. That night, she was crouching on the counter top, trying to stay far away from Nisha who was being held back by Belles. Jay, typically, was no where in sight.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Belles was shouting.
”She’s trying to kill me,” Keri was shrieking. “Ronni! Stop her!”
”I’m going to kill you. Tear you spleen out through you throat!” Nisha shouted.
”Guys, knock it off,” Ronni said coolly as we entered the room. “Nisha, no more Hitchhikers.”
In the chaos that continued, no one noticed Jay step in the kitchen door in her pajamas with a pair of boots and Leanne’s down coat on. “Guys. Guys.” No one noticed her desperately calling to us, trying to get our attention. “Guys. Guys.” Nisha’s violent tendencies were too much of a distraction. Quietly, she climbed onto the kitchen table in her snow boots, stuck her fingers in her ears, and screamed.
All eyes turned to her. We were shocked, to say the least, to see her even in the vicinity of the fight. When we quieted, she unplugged her ears. “There’s a pubescent boy in the root cellar. I think he’s dead.”
